Virtual witnessing? Balthazar Solvyns and the navigation of precision, c.1790–1840

Colesworthy Grant's Portraits of Colonial Society in India: Lithography, Liberalism, and the Global Making of Middle‐Class Culture, c. 1833–57

“…35 Print publications with pretentions to elite knowledge found little official patronage and generally remained commercially unviable, despite attempts by artists to operate within the intellectual frameworks of institutions involved in the production of colonial knowledge, such as Caclutta's Asiatick Society (renamed the Asiatic Society in 1825). 36 In 1792, the artist Arthur William Devis (1762-1822), likely working under the patronage of the Society's first President, William Jones (1746-94), publicized ambitious plans for a synoptic print series of Indian industries and occupations titled the Economy of Human Life. Devis' project failed to materialize, however, despite the artist adapting a comparative historical framework that Orientalists like Jones had applied to the study of India.…”

“…37 Financial difficulties plagued another synoptic attempt to taxonomize the peoples of South Asia prior to the establishment of lithography: Balthasar Solvyns' (1760-1824) Manners, Customs, Character, Dresses, and Religion of the Hindoos, first published in 1796. 38 Working in India without official permission, and beyond the elite institutions in which his project might have secured patronage, Solvyns' returns were meagre; a subsequent attempt to republish the work with L'Institut de France bankrupted its publisher and forced the artist into penury. While still fraught with risk, depictions of the colonial landscape -often working across multiple artistic modes, from the militaristic and exploratory functions of the topographic, to the civic humanist valances of the Grand Style -proved a more commercially successful means to capture or signify knowledge in the years straddling the turn of the nineteenth century.…”